WideEyed Wanderers Just To Be With You
by SongbirdNoodles
Summary: Four times Danny went to Africa and one time he stayed home.


Wide-Eyed Wanderers (Just To Be With You)

**Wide-Eyed Wanderers (Just To Be With You) **

**Summary: **Four times Danny Concannon went to Africa (and one time he didn't)

The first time he goes to Africa, he's leaving the White House in a fierce act of desperation and more than a bit of wounded pride, to, he tells himself, do something that matters. He writes a 12-page feature for Time and another for Newsweek, and realizes he probably has enough to say to write an entire book about what he's seen in the past four weeks.

If he could, he would have fallen in love with this continent by now, with the nasal singing of children, with the dirt, the durst, the prevalent smell of burning tires and sometimes much worse smells. But he's promised himself he's never going to fall in love again, not even with a place.

He rents a house for a year, a guesthouse to a fully operating ranch outside of Nairobi and writes a book. He calls it Against All Odds: The African Struggle To Live to See the 21st Century, and he fees it's an excellent work, balanced journalism and an impassioned manifesto to not neglect this place any longer.

When he's finished with the text, foreword, afterword and acknowledgements, when his editor has made his changes and he's going over the final copy one last time, Danny writes a dedication. Not one. Twenty, at least. He tries to work her into it, somehow, because i would be incredibly satisfying to see what he's forbidden himself to even think about in print in front of him. But none of them sound right, and so he settles on the first one that immediately came to mind:

This book is dedicated to every indescribably strong and resourceful woman I have had the pleasure to meet during my travels through Africa. It is their force that keeps this continent alive.

By the time the first box of copies arrive at his house, it's summer, and, due to the startling developments coming out Washington, he feels closer to home, and closer to her, than he has since coming here. He takes one of the book, opens it to the dedication page and adds, in pen: "I wish you could meet them. They'd make you so proud. Maybe one day, I'll introduce you."

He's just sealing the envelope when he catches the tail end of her briefing on CNN International. She looks like a deer caught in the headlights, is looking at his colleugues like they're the enemy, and he knows it's impossible, but he swears he can see her knuckles tightened and shining around the edges of the podium.

"You know, to tell you the truth, I think the President's relieved to be focusing on something that matters."

The silence rings. Danny stares at the fuzzy picture of his telivision television, incredulous, horrified, resisting the overwhelming instinct to call her and tell her to come here and come live with him, in the middle of the Kenyan savannah, where the antelopes hop through the long grass early in the morning, and sometimes the road is blocked for hours by a lazy pack of elephants.

--

The second time he goes to Africa, it's a few weeks after Zoey Bartlet's kidnapping. He can't stand being in the country anymore, can't stand the panic and the frozen, horrified mood, and so, he leaves again, to a place where life is so much worse, and all the more precious for it.

This time, he travels less, settling on the top floor of a crumbling colonial-style house in Accra, Ghana, with a prehistoric-sounding fan creaking overhead and heavy, expensive furniture. The backyard looks like a picture of the Garden of Eden in a children's bible, bent palm trees blooming burgainvillea, stray cats and monkeys in the trees, and over it all a pungent, almost cloyingly sweet smell. His landlady, Mrs Owoje, a smiling, heavy-set woman with more children and grandchildren than he can keep track of, fries sugary platains in huge cauldrons of palm oil and sells them on the street, always handing him plate full just as they're fresh from the pot. She cooks Fufu, a delicious stew, and half the neighborhoods comes over to enjoy it on moonlit nights, as music drifts through the tropical night air, hip-hop and something older and more magical. One of Mrs. Owoje's daughters runs a small tailoring business out of one of the downstairs room, and one of her nephews and his friends are running their own radio station. When they find out he's a journalist, they're forever asking his advice and opinion, and he feels younger -and more useful- than he has in years. He still writes a regular column for the Post, and a couple of Op-Eds for other papers, and he's working on a new book. He's just thinking about taking a job as a lecturer at the University, just a couple of hours a week, when he's suddenly thrown down with the worst case of Malaria he's contracted since coming here the first time.

He's in the hospital for two weeks, and then the doctor, a Dutch expat who looks like he might be in his nineties, with a funny accent, tells him that usually, this is a sign of homesickness. "Your body is sick of Africa," he says, shrugging shagely. "It happens all the time. Sick of Africa, sick from Africa. Same thing."

He hums and haws and complains, but then his editor from the post calls him and tells him the most significant election in twenty years is about to take place and he had better get his ass home, and he shrugs, and does as he's told.

It's not until he's on the plane that he realizes what this could mean. Maybe. He's so used to consciously not-thinking of her, that now that he's allowing himself to do it, he feels rusty. But the fact his, her time in the White House is coming to a palpable close, and maybe, maybe, it's time for a new beginning in the country he's abandoned.

--

The third time he goes to Africa, he and CJ are going together. In fact, it's their honeymoon. They have six weeks planned -after all, they have that kind of time now, and CJ is going to spend a lot of time in the next couple of years thinking about this place, and he feels personally responsible for showing her the continent he once nearly fell in love with- but are starting with a real honeymoon, a proper one, ten days in a beautiful beach resort on Bazaruto Island in the Indian Ocean.

And while that's lovely, sex and swimming and delicious food, magic comes later.

It comes when he takes her to meet Mrs. Owoje and her nephew in Accra. It comes when they visit the German nun running a children's hospital in Ethiopia whom he met four years ago, and whose lined hands and gigantic heart have haunted him ever since.

Magic comes when she falls asleep on his shoulder on a rocky bus ride in the middle of the Botswana desert, and it comes again when he watches her pick up a baby at a hospital in Kenya with more expertise than he probably would have granted her (though he'll never tell her that). And a different kind of magic, just as powerful but a little more sad, a little less simple, comes whenever the encounter the dark side, the desperate suffering and unimaginable longing for a better life etched into the faces of spent grandmothers in Malawi and hungry children in Uganda, when her fingers find his and sometimes, she hides her face in his shoulder and he knows it's not just being overwhelmed. He knows she feels responsible, both that she didn't do more for these people in the White House and that she hasn't started working for the foundation to change their lives now that she can, and he does his best to lift the weight of that continent off those beautiful shoulders, placing well-meaning kisses on her temples and telling her stories and secrets and sweet little nothings that he knows, sometimes even CJ needs to hear.

On a breezy night in the Kenyan Savannah, having criss-crossed the continent for almost four weeks, they're sitting on the rooftop balcony of the ranch where he spent all those months five years ago, sharing drinks and impressions, and mainly being quiet.

CJ studies him for a moment, then plants a kiss on his lips. "Thanks," she says, quietly.

"For what?"

"For-" she throws her hand wide, scoops up an entire continent of hungry, smiling children and dusty roads in her hands, her soft, lined hands that he can't get enough of- "for this. And for loving me."

He smiles. "You're very welcome."

--

The fourth time he goes to Africa, he's pissed out of his mind. They have been arguing about this trip for weeks, and he was this close to staying at home, but in the end, he knows he has to go. Because he can't resist the lure of this sprawling continent, and more importantly, because someone needs to make sure CJ doesn't do something unimaginably stupid, and, decreed before God and a justice of the peace on a March evening in California over a year ago, that pleasure falls upon, well. Him. For better, for worse, he said, but this is definitely for worse.

He gets that this trip is important. Franklin Hollice himself is coming, and they're meeting with architects and development agencies and a couple of transportation ministers, and uner normal circumstances he would be throwing her a party, but the circumstances aren't normal.

Because she's five months pregnant.

The water. The dirt. The malaria. The traffic. He doesn't even want to think about it.

They spend the first hour of their flight to Frankfurt in huffy, irritable silence as she reads her way through the first of the twenty briefing books she's schlepping around with her and he leafs through the paper. Somewhere over New Foundland, she finally turns to him.

"You're being incredibly immature," she tells him.

"I'M being immature?" He snaps back. "Look at you! You're supposed to be taking care of yourself and our baby, and instead you're zooming through world history and micromanaging and working like you're back in the White House-"

"I know," she says, shrugging. "You're right. Of course you're right."

"But then why-"

"Because I'm right too," she says, earnestly. "I know what it feels like to be running out of chances, I don't ever want to feel that way again. I believe in this. I can take care of more than myself and my kid, I can take care of other people's kids too. I have to believe that I can do that, and Danny, I swear to GOD, I need you to believe it to. You're not my mother. I'm a responsible adult and what, are you stupid? I'm not going to drink African tap water or swim with the elephants or do anything that could, under any possible circumstance, hurt this little guy inside me, and if you can't believe that, you are out of your mind.

He gives in. Of course he does, he smiles ruefully as he kisses her, and he tries not to protect her too much during the following two weeks. When she tells him to for the love of everything holy, back off, because he's driving her insane, he knows she means "I love you".

--

"Okay, honey, say good-bye to Mommy."

They're standing at the security checkpoint at LAX and she's bouncing their fifteen-month old daughter in her arms, her eyes suddenly filled with doubts.

"I can still cancel," she says, randomly. "I don't need to go."

"CJ-" he interjects.

"No, I mean it. I don't have to go. I don't know the last thing about roads and bridges, I'm not going to help anyone, I'll just be in the way. I can still cancel my flight."

"CJ, come on," he says, quietly. "You can do this."

She pulls a hand through her hair, her grip on their baby tightening. "I'll be gone for so long."

"Three weeks really isn't that long."

"Do you think she'll remember me?" CJ whispers, eyes suddenly wide and fearful.

"You're being silly," he tells her. "And I don't like it when you're silly because then I don't get to be silly."

She smiles. "I'm going to miss you like crazy. Both of you."

"We're going to miss you too," he assures, watching her with his heart suddenly tight as she covers their daughter's bright-orange curls with kisses and cuddles the toddler closer towards you.

"Call me when she says a new word, call me right away," CJ insists.

"I will, I promise. Have a safe flight." He holds out his arms, and with a sigh and a moan, she hands their child over. "I love you so much," he tells her, planting a kiss on her lips and hugging he one-handedly, taking in her sweet smell and the feel of her frame beside his, and trying not to think of how much he's going to miss her.

"I love you too," she mumbles into the corner of his mouth, pulls back, and kisses their baby daughter. "And you, I love you so much, baby girl."

"Go," he orders, pressing a last kiss on her knuckles and shoving her towards the security screen.

He watches her get in line, and he and Ellie wave a couple of times before she disappears in the crowd, and the he hoists his daughter up and walks towards the airport parking lot. This time he's not going to Africa. This time he's going home.


End file.
